Si Lewen (8 November 1918,

Lubin Lubin (; ) is a city in Lower Silesian Voivodeship in south-western Poland. It is the administrative seat of Lubin County, and also of the rural district called Gmina Lubin, although it is not part of the territory of the latter, as the town for ...

Poland Poland, officially the Republic of Poland, is a country in Central Europe. It extends from the Baltic Sea in the north to the Sudetes and Carpathian Mountains in the south, bordered by Lithuania and Russia to the northeast, Belarus and Ukrai ...

– 25 July 2016) was a Polish-American painter and member of the

Ritchie Boys The Ritchie Boys, part of the U.S. Military Intelligence Service (MIS) at the War Department, were an organization of soldiers in World War II with sizable numbers of German and Austrian recruits who were used primarily for interrogation of pri ...

, a unit of the United States Army during

World War II World War II or the Second World War (1 September 1939 – 2 September 1945) was a World war, global conflict between two coalitions: the Allies of World War II, Allies and the Axis powers. World War II by country, Nearly all of the wo ...

. Lewen was born in 1918 into a Polish-Jewish family, who moved to Berlin in 1920. He received drawing lessons from Max Adron, a pupil of

Paul Klee Paul Klee (; 18 December 1879 – 29 June 1940) was a Swiss-born German artist. His highly individual style was influenced by movements in art that included expressionism, cubism, and surrealism. Klee was a natural draftsman who experimented wi ...

and

Klaus Richter Klaus Richter (born in 1957) is a German wood scientist and professor emeritus at the Technical University of Munich (TUM), who is a honorary ''fellow'' of the International Academy of Wood Science, editor-in-chief in the scientific journals, Wo ...

. After

Adolf Hitler Adolf Hitler (20 April 1889 – 30 April 1945) was an Austrian-born German politician who was the dictator of Nazi Germany from 1933 until Death of Adolf Hitler, his suicide in 1945. Adolf Hitler's rise to power, He rose to power as the lea ...

came to power in 1933, Lewen and his older brother emigrated to France to prepare for the departure of the entire family to Palestine. In 1935, the family unexpectedly received visas to the United States. There, in New York City, Lewen attended an art school. He volunteered for the United States Army in 1942 and, because of his knowledge of German, became a member of the

. On reaching

Buchenwald Concentration Camp Buchenwald (; 'beech forest') was a German Nazi concentration camp established on Ettersberg hill near Weimar, Nazi Germany, Germany, in July 1937. It was one of the first and the largest of the concentration camps within the Altreich (pre-1938 ...

, he had a breakdown. What he saw inspired his later artwork about the war.

Art Spiegelman Itzhak Avraham ben Zeev Spiegelman ( ; born February 15, 1948), professionally known as Art Spiegelman, is an American cartoonist, editor, and comics advocate best known for his graphic novel ''Maus''. His work as co-editor on the comics magazin ...

, author of ''

Maus ''Maus'', often published as ''Maus: A Survivor's Tale'', is a graphic novel by American cartoonist Art Spiegelman, serialized from 1980 to 1991. It depicts Spiegelman interviewing his father about his experiences as a History of the Jews in P ...

'', published ''Lewen's Parade: An Artist's Odyssey'' in 2016, an "expanded "director's cut" version of images Lewen had created from 1950 and published in 1957 under the title ''Parade''.

References

American painters American people of Polish-Jewish descent Ritchie Boys 1918 births 2016 deaths {{US-painter-1910s-stub